count it all
The first day we visited Graeter’s Ice Cream on the edge of downtown Cincinnati, Jimmy, who is the owner, came out from behind the counter with coloring books and crayons for the kids eating ice cream with their grandma at the table next to ours, and then, walking over to our table with a wide smile, handed Adam a handful of lanyards. While serving us, he had kindly inquired not just about our order but about our family and our trip, and now, within this gesture, had memorably shown us what it looks like to have a natural inclination toward generosity and giving.
I sat at that little round table eating my ice cream—bourbon ball with butterscotch–thinking that kindness made it more delicious, that Jimmy’s easy-going openness had even made me feel differently about the city, where, as visitors and avid fans of the opposing baseball team, we had also encountered some of the most abrasive people yet.
But, I try now to remember, there was the mama sitting behind us at the first game who tapped my shoulder and asked if she could take our picture for us, and there was the woman sitting out on her front stoop near our VRBO who had laughed with us one morning as we tromped, in bathing-suits and flipflops and shoulder-slung towels, down the city street on our way to our car and the water park. And then, there was Jimmy.
In practice, I collect pictures of kindness and treasure them up alongside a life full of gathered gifts, in answer to a clear invitation from God to count it all joy, or in other words, to count it all with careful awareness of grace, because I don’t know why except for brokenness, but it can be so easy to go sour and bitter and lose track of the truth. There are those days, you know the ones, when darkness seems so deep, and I can get lost thinking about all the hard things, looking down into the murk of storm and swelling waves instead of up and into the face of God.
I talk to Zoe about this as we meander around the perimeter of the ice cream shop on our way out of town, drawn back for tender bites of morning pastries, a few remembrances, and to offer a see ya later to Jimmy and his staff, who have, in the space of just a few days, made us feel at home.
“I understand why God keeps saying remember, remember, remember, because I need reminders, especially on the days I’m tempted to grumble and complain, that I do get to experience adventures, and I do get to rest, and I am so blessed all the time. I need reminders to turn me back to the truth, to nudge me back toward giving thanks.”
She nods, agreeing, and this continuing conversation of ours along the way is another gift I gather and count for remembering.
In my hand, I carry a few soft Graeter’s Cincinnati t-shirts, knowing I’ll slip mine on and remember all of this—the sweetness of it, the joy—on days when I feel particularly weary, that I’ll literally wear the goodness and love of God, as represented in the best parts of this experience, against my skin on days when my body groans in the growing. Knowing me, loving me, God trains me to remember with every one of my senses.
I think Ann Voskamp, in one of her many excellent books, first gave me a new way of seeing that word, remember, inserting a dash that turned it into a bit of poetry for me, a visual teaching, that to be re-minded, to re-member, is to allow God to put me back together all new. I’m learning that to worry is to be torn to pieces by the cares of this broken-up world, and that to pray, with thanksgiving, is to be tied together and made whole, guarded by the redemptive power of God, unconformed to the patterns of the world, but re-newed in my mind instead. Forces of evil would dismember and dismantle me, but God aims to make me beautifully whole and to keep me harmoniously held. So, He surrounds me with love and crowns me with compassion and invites me, with every kind of re-minder, to keep my eyes fixed on Him.
I’ll wear my t-shirt, re-minded of Jimmy and the sweetness of this place, re-membered by the truth that I do experience the goodness of God in the land of the living, even though days come when anger and unkindness and suffering shout loud, like curses flung from car windows in the dead of night. I’ve learned that re-membering, as a spiritual practice, must be an intentional part of my life with God, because remembrances reach with a holy hand, and I live in a pit-fall kind of place.
On this second trip into Graeter’s, Jimmy sends Jeanine over to our little round table, where we have bisected our pastries into fourths and sit chewing them slowly, sugar dissolving on our tongues, with a big boxed-up, bagged-up batch of cookies.
Jeanine smiles, lifting the bag toward us, says, “Jimmy says, ‘Take these with you and try them too, see what you think.’”
Kindness upon kindness, grace upon grace, this unmerited favor, this generous giving that need know nothing of us except that we are. It moves me to wonder if interactions with me could also do a Samaritan’s healing for a stranger, could so radically change another soul’s experience of this place. It inspires me to wonder if I could, with the real kindness of Jesus, extend love even to those who show their vulnerability and pain in anger and contempt. Could I learn to interpret unkindness as another form of the illness that once also left me for dead in a ditch?
In conversation at the ballpark, as some of the home team fans chanted, vile vitriol tumbling ugly from their mouths, Zoe and I had talked about this too, thinking aloud together about how Christ’s response to such things is most certainly opposite our own, He being drawn toward the captive and oppressed, being naturally inclined toward love and compassion, grace and forgiveness.
“Hey, can we get a picture with you?” Kevin asks Jimmy now, as we push our chairs in and move toward the door.
This collection of kindness, this way of re-membering we practice on every trip, our pictures full of faces from so many tribes and nations and tongues already, pops up on our phones from time to time as ready-made re-minders, our smiles stretched wide by grace.
So, we ask Jimmy to let us count him with the rest, as we try to count it all joy.
“Oh, yes,” Jimmy agrees readily. “Let’s do it over here where you can see the Graeter’s sign in the background. I’m short, so,” he says, leaving that last bit dangling, stepping in front and striking a pose, hands propped on his hips, punctuating the poetry.
